047 Fall Cleaning
White background. This comic is only one large panel. It shows Zane in the antique shop, whistling and cleaning off the windows with a large white rag. To his right is the cage in which he put the bat earlier. The window is made of sixteen square panes, seven of which have cracks in them. The space between the panes is white, as is the background of the image, which gives the effect of them looking at once like individual panes, different panels of a comic and like some sort of fragmented puzzle. The windows are so dusty that there is a distinct difference between the color of Zane's forehead, where there's one small patch that he's gotten completely clean, and the color of the hand he's not using to clean, which is held at his side by a part of the window that hasn't been cleaned at all. The patch of forehead we see in the one entirely clean part is pale, nearly white, while the color of his hand as seen through the layers of dust is a mottled, sickly light blue. Zane is wiping off the dust in a haphazard way, not settling on cleaning any one pane at a time but wiping several of them, and he is cleaning with small, circular motions that cause looping, cloudy patterns in the glass. The background, or rather the inside of the shop, is a dark blue, and where Zane has cleaned are swirls in lighter blue. These swirls extend over several of the top left and middle panels. Zane has evidently been working on it for some time, but it is so dirty that he hasn't made much progress. It is unclear whether or not the reader is intended to see any deeper meaning in the patterns on the window. Human pattern recognition is such that we can see faces everywhere if we're looking for them. The pattern of dust is complex, with many layers represented by subtle shades of blue, and I see at least two patterns that could be interpreted as face-like. That said, both of them are a stretch. Neither seem to me like a sure thing that the creator consciously placed there. That is, seeing them might be a result of the desire of a reader of a creepy comic to see something hidden and creepy, and nothing more. That said, there is one shape in the top left that seems vaguely like a round face with a wide open mouth and two half-closed eyes, with large round cartoonish ears on each side of the head. Underneath it is a round shape that looks slightly as if it has small eyes, a triangular nose and a slit for a mouth. The other panels that have been partially cleaned off are different shades of purple and blue and grey, but those two panels seem to be a different shade of blue, one that is reminiscent of the ghosts that Zane saw earlier. It is impossible to say if that's an intended effect or if it's just a variation of color, as another panel has that same color and there's nothing at all ghostly in it.